So, you’ve created a beautiful event page and fine tuned your ticket sales settings to perfection. Your event is poised to be a smash hit. It’s time to get the word out there and share your event with the world, but where to start?

From the usual suspects of social media and search engine optimisation, to event aggregators and content distribution tools, there are literally thousands of ways to promote your event online these days. With all of these options fighting for your time (and money), we'd like to do our part to make that learning curve a little less steep.

To help you get started with marketing for your next event, we’ve narrowed the field down to our three favourite tools and strategies. Select a topic below, start building buzz around your next event, and boost your pre-sales with these top tips – or read on to learn more about how we think about digital marketing for events at Billetto.

Digital Marketing and E-Commerce for Events

While the links above will help get you thinking about how to reach and engage your fans, it’s also helpful to take a bird's eye view of your new micro-business.

A great way to frame the goals of your online marketing efforts is to look at the whole process like a funnel. Potential customers and fans will typically go through a number of steps before they make a purchase online. Normally, these steps can be broken down into five steps: Awareness, Interest, Learn, Shop, and Buy.

When it comes to selling tickets for events online, responsibility for the different steps in this funnel are often split between two main parties – the event organiser, and the facilitator of the transaction (i.e. who processes the sale).

Although the setup will vary from event-to-event, generally speaking it’s the job of these two players to make it as smooth as possible for potential customers to proceed to the next step of the funnel, and, in the end, make buying a ticket as easy as possible.

Typically this means that you, as the event organiser, are responsible for promoting the event, spreading the word and “selling” your event to as many people as possible. The ticketing providing then takes over when a customer is ready to purchase, handling payment and issuing tickets.

At Billetto, we look at things a bit differently.

Billetto is a community. This means that just by creating an event, you join an online marketplace and gain access to a whole lot of potential ticket buyers, dramatically increasing Awareness of your event right off the bat.

As the facilitator of the transaction, we’re also continually working to improve those final crucial steps a customer takes when they purchase a ticket. There are infinite ways to chip away and lower the number of customers who drop off; whether that be the wording on a button, or the layout of our event pages.

So, in terms of the funnel above, we aim to do a few things. Firstly, we enhance the scope of Awareness about events, increasing the number of people entering the funnel by sharing it with the community. Through editorial curation and creative content we amplify the scope of the steps to follow (Interest, Learn) to make sure that once someone finds out about an event, they find out why it’s great. And, lastly, we keep chipping away at customer drop-off during checkout by optimising the technical aspects.

When thinking about marketing for your event, consider what you can do to pull an audience in and quickly progress them through the first steps of the funnel. Have a look at our tips on making the most of event pre-sales for a few ideas on how to keep interest up ahead of your event. Use a targeted approach to find people who you know will love it and give them an opportunity to learn more with a fully loaded event description.

As with most marketing tactics, there are numerous ways to "optimise" and make the most of your time. It’s important to choose the right partners and tools to amplify your work, but being thoughtful and strategic in your own campaigns will always pays off. We hope this crash course got you thinking about promotion for your next event!